Scotland’s diaspora

Big Macs

IN 1908 a tobacco company, John Player and Sons, enclosed in its cigarette packets cards portraying Scottish Highlanders wearing kilts woven in different tartans. In response to strong demand this set of 25 cards was recently reprinted, and it is now available by mail-order from the London Cigarette Card Company. Nostalgic collectors of Scottish memorabilia sift through, and pore over, these cards with much the same misty-eyed sentimentality that runs through “The Great Feud”, a book which purports to deplore but seems to revel in the bloody rivalry of the MacDonalds and the Campbells. For the best part of 500 years, members of these two clans fought with unrestrained ferocity, sometimes against outsiders but mainly against each other.

It is a terrible book in both senses of that word. Terribly written and so condensed that the clotted history it tells is accessible only to tartaned anoraks. Terrible, too, in its description of the feuding of the clansmen. Their barbarous excesses, in Oliver Thomson's account, make yesterday's Scottish Highlands resemble today's Sierra Leone.

Alistair MacLeod's novel is about a branch of one of these clans: a family of MacDonalds who set sail for Cape Breton Island in 1779 to escape the degradation of the Highlands that followed the battle of Culloden. But whereas “The Great Feud” is a travesty of factual writing, “No Great Mischief” is a triumph of fiction. Unlike Mr Thomson, Mr MacLeod is a gifted Canadian writer with something provocative to say—and he says it well. He spent several years writing “No Great Mischief”, and none of that time was wasted. His story-telling is taut and lucid. His characters possess strength and depth. They linger in your mind.

On the surface, it is the story of the hard lives and often violent deaths of the descendants of Calum MacDonald, the head of that family which crossed the Atlantic in the late 18th century to settle on an island that is now part of Canada. But just below this surface is a lament for the family's loss of a sense of place and identity, and a scream of protest against the hegemony of American culture. In this novel, the pros of western prosperity are outweighed by the cons of blandness.

For Alexander MacDonald, the main character of “No Great Mischief”, the metaphor for the emptiness of modern life is his profession. As an orthodontist, he is “in the business of improving on God” by making more beautiful people who can afford his high fees for “retrusion and occlusion and the problems caused by overbite”. When he peels off his latex gloves he sees hands with damp pink wrinkles. They are quite unlike the hands of his outdoors brothers, hard-working men with palms that are calloused by the axes they grip, the chains they clutch, and the ropes they pull on their lobster traps.

At a conference of orthodontists in Dallas, Alexander MacDonald falls into conversation with a fellow practitioner whose tag reads: “Hi! My Name Is Bill Miller.” After denouncing communised medicine in Canada, this colleague tells him: “You should come to Texas. In our business , you've got to go where the money is and now the money is here in Texas. This is where the rich are, and they're willing to pay to be beautiful.” He will not, says Mr Miller, even have to change his name. With a good “Irish name” like MacDonald, he will find it easy to attract patients. What then was the name of the Millers before they changed it, asks orthodontist MacDonald. “I don't know,” laughs orthodontist Miller. “Who cares? It's all in the past.” Alexander MacDonald's cousin from California is just as uninterested in his roots, and contemptuous of national distinctiveness. “Why don't you speak English?” he demands of a French-Canadian miner. “This is North America.”

For Mr MacLeod, assimilation that destroys the past is a terrible wrong: a denial of the language, family and culture “lurking in the ventricles of the heart”. Yet this novel fosters no illusions about pre-modern lives. Characters are orphaned by accidents on the ice. Others are killed or maimed while mining, fishing or logging. A description of the horrors of frost-bitten ears could not be more graphic or more gruesome. But, the novel asks, need the costs of progress be so high? Will excitement in future be provided only by adventure holidays? Will Campbell's Soups and Big Macs be the only reminders of once famous clans? In “No Great Mischief”, the resounding answer is “yes”.